What I would do if I was Google

2) Stop showing Site: and use true page clustering. so two pages per site will be displayed, This will stop people worrying about how many pages are in the index also stops link hunting, webmaster central will be the only place you can get that data.

3) on redirects, a site that redirects to more than ONE site will be deemed has potentially damaging and will not be Indexed, this would stop the tinyurls been indexed and affiliate tracking URLs like in the recent Bedstar case

4) sub-domains would get clustered there for only showing 2 pages, yes I know it will upset wordpress hosted user, but i don’t care buy a domain it’s 5 bucks

5) and finally I would not display paying Adsense blocks on pages that aren’t in the index

David Naylor

David Naylor, more commonly known as DaveN, started working in the SEO industry in it's infancy, starting with three major corporations releasing their database driven data, creating internal link structures and improving usability.

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27 Comments

Glen Allsopp - http://www.viperchill.com/blog/

If they are going to keep pagerank then at least make it live

JLH - http://www.jlh-design.com

1. Stop preaching and start helping/answering questions/communicating.
2. Disable the worthless link: command.
3. Show supplemental pages in webmaster’s central
4. Update statistics every 5 years or so in webmaster’s central.
5. Give up on the nofollow disaster they’ve created and let people get back to making sites for people and not machines.

BONUS
6. Update their webmaster’s blog more than quarterly.

Joost de Valk

Honestly, if I were Google, I’d stop doing anything for webmasters 🙂

aaron wall

I totally agree with the clustering bits. PageRank is their way to get people to opt in. I don’t see them removing that from a Public Relations standpoint too as they get talked about a lot for it.

What I would do
1.) review every site before placing paying adsense ads on it…have algos that review it against other sites too for stolen content, etc. people inside Google have to know this is a big issue.
2.) require that an adsense publisher verifies he owns the site he is placing ads on, or if it is a group site then at least have them verify that they want their ads to show up on that site
3.) I would probably put the redirect limit at more than 2 because there are times that companies form brands and spin them out into their own unique sites… maybe put it at require manual review if greater than 5 or 10 or something like that.
4.) I would take known related corporate sites and cluster them with the other sites from the same company, only showing the leading 1, especially on nonbrand keywords. look at bankrate for some examples of how a company can use subdomains + other sites to dominate the whole serp
5.) remove incentive for those who publish the bottomless, endless, useless everyone can be a writer meta-aggregator websites that are springing up.

I would remove organic search results for all commercial queries and who wants real estate queries let them buy it at google better then feeding link industry and affiliate marketers

5 things I would do if I were Google - pingback

[…] Naylor recently wrote an article on 5 things he would do if he were Google. At the end of his post, he asks what we we […]

Peter Young - http://www.e-gain.co.uk

Good post Dave – know you’ve seen my comments on my post further this post but have to agree with some of Aarons post in particular “5.) remove incentive for those who publish the bottomless, endless, useless everyone can be a writer meta-aggregator websites that are springing up.”

My real concern with much of the new content push (lets face it contents always been key), is the fact that there is a lot of drivel out there already – and people pushing content, content, content, will unfortunately only increase the amount of ‘scraped’ content with people searching for quick, easy solutions.

Rob the Chef - http://agreatchef.com

Add a feature in Webmaster Central to show if you, or any of your sites are linking into a bad neighborhood or to a site that Go(d)ogle has recently penalized. This way we can be more proactive in managing our links instead of running blind.

Jason Duke - http://www.kosmix.com/Health/strangelogic-s?

Dave, do you REALLY think they’ll implement your suggestions ?

DaveN

Jason , I can’t see any reason why they would lol… mind you the did move to Qtr pagerank updates and they did randomise the link: data … so you never Know… 😉

Okay, top fives thing I’d do if I were Google.
1. Evil.
2a. Monetize on all the profitable adsense revenues.
2b. Buy out all companies that do little work yet make lots of money with their websites.
3. Take £10 off each credit card it has on file (that spend £1000 a month or more on adwords).
4. Drive out all competition in anything internet related.
5. Rule the friggin world!

Joe Duck - http://joeduck.wordpress.com

* Paid site reviews to identify simple problems or penalties. The subtle confusion Google spawns from ambiguous rules applied to mom and pop sites who have no clue is hurting everybody, including Google.

* Implement “site ID” where all sites showing adsense must have a contact person who is identified publicly. Forward site complaints to this person.

* Have more Google parties but drop the cold hamburgers from Google Dance 2007

* Transparency on publisher revenue share from Adsense

* MORE transparency on guidelines and penalties. Less vague references to “sites built for users not adsense”.

Jason Duke – Naylor is one of the few people in SEO that Google pays a lot of attention to, so they might not implement stuff but you can bet high level Google folks read this blog!

Improving Google « Joe Duck - pingback

[…] but that is what the internet, and blogging in particular, is all about. Master UK SEO Dave Naylor has got five suggestions over at his blog and several others have chimed in. I wasn’t […]

Anonymous - http://www.carramba.net

You know how it goes, they ban one lot of stuff and then a different form of manipulation pops up. I think they are following your advice on the page rank one. Cannot remember the least time that was updated. I guess people would start using Alexa instead.

RSnake - http://ha.ckers.org/

I’d stop indexing feeds. God I hate it when I am searching for something obscure and find that Google feels I should be looking at XML data. Come on, Google. I know that’s not directly SEO related, but it’s super annoying. Why they value XML feeds at all is beyond me.

Like a Help Center in 18 languages? Dozens of Googlers at conferences around the world? Dozens of GooglerPosts a month in U2U groups in multiple languages? (and counting John Mueller, we’re now talking a lot more posts :D)

> 2. Disable the worthless link: command.

Why? So competitors can’t get a sampling of your backlinks? Don’t be greedy! 🙂

> 3. Show supplemental pages in webmaster’s central

I don’t see this as likely, but I expect we’ll be offering more tools that help webmasters get at the root of issues rather than fumbling along trying to make incorrect assumptions just based upon what index a document happens to be placed in. I won’t even mention that *all* the other major search engines have gone on record as noting they have multiple distinct indexes, and yet I haven’t seem people clamoring for tags in that context.

> 4. Update statistics every 5 years or so in webmaster’s central.

I expect updates in Webmaster Tools will be more frequent.

> 5. Give up on the nofollow disaster they’ve created and let people get back to making sites for people and not machines.

Should we also give up on robots.txt, too, since that’s for machines rather than people, right? I expect nofollow will be used with increasing precision and fairness; e.g., expiring nofollows for trusted contributors.

> BONUS
> 6. Update their webmaster’s blog more than quarterly.

8 posts in the last month… and that’s not counting our German or Chinese webmaster blogs, either. Methinks you have a strange conception of quarterly ;).

Oh, and Dave, thanks for the list. Interesting stuff.

NickyG

lol it would be nice if google listened to their customers/clients…. mmm that will be the day….

What would JLH do - pingback

[…] Naylor posed an interesting question, ” What would I do if I were Google?” To which I quickly and without much thought responded: 1. Stop preaching and start […]

Fireblade

The main thing for me would be to internalise all the functions not directly related to search. Link, site, etc. The webmaster tools is the right place for these commands. While the other engines offer this data it may never happen. If they continue to use the toolbar it should be at least accurate or just dump it. Ditch no follow is a given.

Camalaniugan - http://www.camalaniugan.com

I will go with you Fireblade, toolbar is not accurate sometimes it just dump.. Webmaster tools is the right place. Thanks for this interesting articles.

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